The slow economy has forced AMD, the world's second largest chipmaker, to make some hard decisions in the wake of consecutive quarterly losses. The company has been cutting jobs and posted a massive loss in 2008.

In 2008 alone AMD lost over $3 billion with a big chunk of the loss coming as a result of the company’s purchase of ATI in 2006. Earlier this month, AMD shareholders voted to allow the spinoff of AMD's manufacturing arm.

DailyTech reported in late February that AMD CEO Dirk Meyer had said that the spinoff would be a culture change for AMD as lots of skilled employees left the chipmaker to help start the new manufacturing company.

Globalfoundries will begin building AMD Opteron and Turion chips for AMD and the company reports that it may outsource the building of its ATI GPUs in the future. Globalfoundries will be headed by former AMD CEO Hector Ruiz. Ruiz was the chairman of the AMD board and his former position with AMD will be filled by Bruce Clafin, a former 3Com and IBM executive.

AMD will continue to migrate its processors from the current 65nm process to a smaller 45nm process. AMD also announced new ATI mobile GPUs this week that are constructed using 40nm process technology.

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